[Curtis Gale Weeks]

To a Certain Civilian, Walt Whitman


Did you ask dulcet rhymes from me?
Did you seek the civilian's peaceful and languishing rhymes?
Did you find what I sang erewhile so hard to follow?
Why I was not singing erewhile for you to follow, to understand--nor am I now;
(I have been born of the same as the war was born,
The drum-corps' rattle is ever to me sweet music, I love well the martial dirge,
With slow wail and convulsive throb leading the officer's funeral; )
What to such as you anyhow such a poet as I? therefore leave my works,
And go lull yourself with what you can understand, and with piano-tunes,
For I lull nobody, and you will never understand me.

I dedicate the citation of this poem to Len, suspecting its warm reception.


I love Tom's observation, "Haven't you noticed that the people who write free verse on these boards--presumably the very ones people who love metrical, syllabic, accentual verse want to 'win over'--NEVER participate in these discussions?" but my reasoning until this point has not been that I don't want to hear these things, as Tom suggested, but that I recognize that the task of attempting to cause an effectual change in the environment of Eratosphere--particularly among some ardent metricists--would be monumental, to say the very least. The fact that Len and some others have dismissed free verse poetry summarily, disregarding the multitudes who have and continue to support and enjoy free verse, aligns rather neatly with the religious fundamentalism so obvious in our culture and in other cultures. Of course it "aligns;" it rhymes rather well with those fundamentalisms, too, but not in a way which can be discerned by the accidental pairing of vowels and consonants. So, why bother responding? Tom's reference to the immutability of a free-verser's stance when confronted by such blithe dismissals can be compared to the immutability of some metricists' stance with regard to free verse. I can--and feel obliged to--say that this schism is unfortunate. Thus, I recognize the fact that whatever I might say about New Formalism or free verse will be received at some distance from the actual topic by some members on both "sides" of the issue.


There is the adage that only two kinds of writing exist--good writing and bad writing (re: you know who)--but of course this is a witticism which has only one practical value: it confuses the argument. I can only answer for myself when assigning the values of "good/bad."--Or, perhaps I can answer for a community, a "school" of poetry, an ivory tower of one kind or another. When I happen to stumble upon a discussion such as this thread, I see so many theoretic voices and so few actual voices. I see the school/tower, but the inhabitants of each--with a few exceptions--are one mass. Quite frankly, there's much about New Formalism which I detest. There's much about Free Verse which I equally detest--These last statements are directed against the schools and not against the methods employed by these schools, per se; rather, it is the blind adherence to limited precepts which devalues both schools of thought.

*

The things I detest about New Formalism are summarized very well by the above poem by Walt Whitman. New Formalism is at its worst when it attempts to codify thought processes for a community. I equate this tendency to religious fundamentalism, racial fundamentalism, and every other form of fundamentalism. New Formalism often says: "These are the fundamentals of poetry; nothing beside has value without these." Then, of course, the New Formalist must bemoan the rampant heresy of free verse--As with religious fundamentalism, New Formalism tends to see itself beset on every side by formulae which it does not prefigure: because New Formalism has defined its medium as the True Poetry and has assigned recognizable and inviolable methods for achieving its medium, anything which operates outside its modality is necessarily a False Poetic. This modality has a tendency to attempt the negation of disparate voices, disparate thought processes, and at its worst creates the "lull" of which Whitman was speaking: rather than the "charged language" which Len invokes, it "focuses the human sensibility on more than just the paraphrasable content of human speech;" i.e., it focuses the human sensibility along paths prescribed by New Formalism, proscribing all other paths--and this effect tends to dull the delivery of the final product. As I said before, I am referring to the school of New Formalism and its evangelistic vanguard (and, generally, their works), not its methods per se.


I also view this fundamentalist modality as being opposed to most things scientific--so many Newtonians, so few Einsteins and Hawkings. In the attempt to establish a Unified Field Theory, most New Formalists have reverted back to traditional maxims while turning a blind eye to current discoveries: Sure, a New Formalist might write a witty sonnet about relativity, but in so doing, said Formalist will almost certainly create a sonnet which is quite stilted, inadequate for its subject. The Uncertainty Principle is metaphorical fodder for most New Formalists: a quaint theory which can be hijacked for its surface appeal but can hardly be acknowledged seriously--perhaps e. e. cummings is one exception among only a handful of formalists.


Finally, and worst of all (but as a result of the foregoing), New Formalism tends to produce writers and readers incapable of reading free verse: minds are atrophied by too frequent and absolute exposure to the methods of those "piano tunes." This effect tends to limit the resources of such writers, further dulling their poems. We decry senseless repetition in any given poem, but New Formalism demands the repetition of form within a limited subset for only one reason: It must, or it will cease to exist.

*

The things that I detest about Free Verse are its hypocrisy and lackadaisical approach toward communication. Interestingly, my e-dictionary has this definition and etymological sourcing of "lackadaisical":

lack·a·dai·si·cal adj. Lacking spirit, liveliness, or interest; languid. [From lackadaisy,
alteration of lackaday.]

lack·a·day interj. Archaic. Used to express regret or disapproval. [Alteration of alack the day.]

a·lack interj. Used to express sorrow, regret, or alarm: [On the model of alas. See LACK.]

--And what is worse than Free Verse's limpid resolve to be forever whining and lack-luster? "Oh I/we lack"--understanding, certitude, love, and everything--"So this is the way the Universe must be: lacking order and prefigured coherence." The worst Free Verse believes itself superior in its understanding of the great Uncertainty Principle, by virtue of the fact that it is often so random. But. The worst Free Verse believes itself to be expressing a very definite emotion or paradigm or thought: i.e., it shows a randomness--and, best of all, it thinks, via a lax form--but attempts to express a very distinct certitude of one modality or another. The worst Free Verse thinks it is being clever without actually being clever. It attempts to address the Uncertainty Principle and relativity, but does so superficially, hypocritically, because it doesn't actually believe in those principles, nor does it understand how those principles can exist in a definite (certain) reality.


What the worst Free Verse hasn't figured out: it needs order because it believes in order: it doesn't know how or why it should express this order. This comes through very clearly in much free verse. The adherence to lackadaisical approaches is a fundamentalism all its own, an anti-poetic, in my opinion. On the other hand, I suspect that many Free Verse poets believe that this adherence is itself a kind of order; and, when such is expressed repetitively, it creates dull poems.

*

And then there's the rub: What is this "order?" Finding a prescribed order as the metricists have done strikes me as being too easy, most of the time. Conversely, I believe all forms--found or personally invented--are tools merely; thus, traditional forms and meters have their uses. I also believe that the "lackadaisical" approach is a tool, as useful as metrics. There might also be order which is so foreign to me that I don't easily apprehend it, don't recognize it--I've had this experience on numerous occasions, with proverbial bolts of lightning attendant. Yea, even repetition has its use. What I don't like, however, are poems which are admissions of limitation: or, the egoistic adherence to arbitrary aesthetics: "...I like it/Because it is bitter/And because it is my heart."






--C.



[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited January 04, 2002).]